Ha Seong-nan (author), Janet Hong (translator), Bluebeard's First Wife, Open Letter Books, 2020. 230 pgs.
The following words resonate throughout the eleven stories in this short-story collection involving relocation, job change, sexual assault, vehicular manslaughter, a taxi ride, and accidental death: "Outside cones of light was total darkness"—although it refers to a physical situation in one story, I take this sentence metaphorically. The "cones of light" is what we assume we know about others; the "total darkness" being the amount we don't and can't know about others.
Ha's plots are rather straightforward and they unfold in unhurried fashion, until something stark happens in the last paragraphs of the story (your initial impression might be boring—but please persist). Her writing style is matter-of-fact, succinct, and no-frills, except when she inserts vivid description at crucial points in the text. For example, "Her face was crumpled with pain, but no tears came. Saliva drivelled from her parted lips, the way crabs foam at the mouth." (The Star-Shaped Stain); and "My legs moved on their own accord, independently, like a squirming octopus that had been chopped to pieces." (Bluebeard's First Wife) Note the "humans as animals" imagery, also used in other stories in the collection. This makes the stories ultimately more disturbing because they take the ordinary to show the extraordinary lies behind the ordinary.
In the first story, "The Star-Shaped Stain", a mother goes in search of a daughter she hopes is still alive after the death of 22 students in a classroom fire. The "stain" on the child's clothing becomes a kind of talisman in the hope that somehow the child had been spared. The mother's grief is interwoven with the guilt of how she had neglected her daughter, had viewed her as "pathetically ordinary", with no distinguishing features. Now, in her (presumed) death, she was special. In many ways the mother in "On That Green, Green Grass" is similar, as a mother who neglects her son for days on end and ignores warning signs of a dangerous stranger while searching for her missing dog. When she finally finds her dog, she learns that her son has been kidnapped that same night.
In "A Quiet Night" a woman's husband quits his banking job to pursue his dream of becoming a carpenter, and she is forced to work long hours of retail while still doing all the household chores. The husband is still not satisfied due to the noise upstairs, the wife further accommodates his needs for "quietness", to the detriment of her own life's plans. She finally asks: "And what had been my dream, you ask? I was so tired I didn't even have time to dream."
In "Night Poaching", perhaps my favourite story in the collection, a detective goes to a small town outside Seoul to investigate a murder in the local hunting community. The community's distrust of the stranger, the fear of secrets being brought to light is emphasised. The hunters here hunt the stranger, but ironically, they become animal-like in nature:
They all had an unhurried way about them, with sharp jawlines and large, serene mouths, big eyes that drooped at the corners. How could I put it? They resembled gentle herbivores, animals that would chew cud, moving their jaws slowly.
However, they are not gentle cows. Drunk, the hunters in the town might go after "human deer". At night "an accident could happen…A creature spewing double barrels of fire could come and set off a deafening roar. Rabbits, raccoons, boars, roes, and deer are slaughtered all through the night. But an entirely different animal could end up dead."
In the title story, a woman and a man rush into marriage due to parental pressure rather than love—expecting blandness, but ultimately experiencing horror. Centring on a "princess wardrobe", which her father had, ever since she was a girl, promised her as a wedding gift, it represents compensation for such a marriage. The wardrobe, however, becomes her greatest horror when she discovers her husband's secret and realises that she is only the first victim of what will become a recurrent scheme.
In "Flies", after a drunken night of sex with a village girl he had been stalking, a police officer, newly transferred to that town, comes up against a community who demand he marry the person whose innocence he steals—except that this person is said to be the girl's sister. The policeman, his own memory hazy, nevertheless convinces himself that the villagers have conspired to marry him off to a girl already pregnant by another man.
Similarly, the woman in "Joy to the World" finds herself pregnant after a night of heavy drinking with her fiancΓ© and his three friends, but none of them confess to being the father. The story begins with the woman stating that she and her fiancΓ© had made "made the decision to get married around the time our relationship started to feel a little boring" and that "I knew all there was to know about him", so there are no surprises likely in their future life together. Little does she know of a pact that joins all four friends together, in a kind of Faustian secret pact.
In "Pinky Finger", the story starts with a warning to women: "Never get into a taxi alone at night." "Why does a mother's advice to a daughter sound like nagging, no matter how protective or affectionate? All mothers exaggerate," the story's protagonist states. We know after this however that "something" will certainly happen. It certainly does, and we experience an adventurous taxi ride with a bizarre magical twist at the end.
The last story in the collection, "Daisy Fleabane", consists of the calm thoughts of a bloated corpse of a young girl as she is dragged along a riverbed by fishermen, unbeknownst to them, in "catfish season". The corpse remembers her life as she drifts along certain spots on the river, till we finally hear how she came to die, and ultimately found. She notices that Daisy Fleabane (small daisy-like flowers) are "already in bloom"—strange—as "Isn't it early spring right now?", she has "fully bloomed" as in being a decaying corpse, ironically the expression "full bloom of life" comes to mind.
Ambition, familial responsibilities, and expectations of marriage come together to reveal hidden sides to neighbours, wives, and husbands in these stories. The characters here often have to make pragmatic adjustments to new environments and situation, all while dreaming of something better in the future. We feel their frustration. Real life can be surreal. What do we know really?
How to cite: Eagleton, Jennifer. "Outside Cones of Light was Total Darkless: Ha Seong-nan's Bluebeard's First Wife." Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 31 Jul. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/07/31/bluebeard.
Jennifer Eagleton, a Hong Kong resident since October 1997, is a close observer of Hong Kong society and politics. Jennifer has written for Hong Kong Free Press, Mekong Review, and Education about Asia. Her first book is Discursive Change in Hong Kong (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) and she is currently writing another book on Hong Kong political discourse for Palgrave MacMillan. Her poetry has appeared in Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, People, Pandemic & ####### (Verve Poetry Press, 2020), and Making Space: A Collection of Writing and Art (Cart Noodles Press, 2023). A past president of the Hong Kong Women in Publishing Society, Jennifer teaches and researches part-time at a number of universities in Hong Kong. [All contributions by Jennifer Eagleton.]
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